Category Archives: My Equipment

I use Takahashi NJP-160 mount. It has been manufactured for some years in unchanged form. It seems that the guys form Takahashi believe that there is nothing to be changed in this design.

Two versions are available – with or without Temma (GoTo system). My version was without it but I bought FS2 GoTo system produced by Astro Electronic from Germany.

Technical specification:

Type: German equatorial

Az adjustment: 15°

Alt adjustment: 20°-50°

PEC: 4 arcsec

Head weight: 25 kg (55 lbs)

Load capacity: 30 kg (65 lbs)

4 counterweights look like this – 4 x 6.5kg (26kg). All of them may be used to balance scopes installed on NJP-160. The mount will carry more weight but it is not recommended for astrophotography.
Not every mount has such capacity 🙂

HX-916
and the rest of equipmentThe camera and the equipment in case.Unfortunately all the cable presented in the picture are used.

Autoguider SBIG ST-4A specialised guiding camera – SBIG ST-4 with CPU for guiding purposes looks like this. More information on the camera and its technical specification you can find on its manufacturer web.

Astronomy

“To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.” - Nicolaus Copernicus

Astronomy is a great adventure into a distant words which rememinds us how small we all are living on our planet Earth and imagine how hugly hudge the entire universe is. The Sun with its planet system, moons travelling around the planets or our gests - comets visiting us from time to time. Looking through our home galaxy - the Mikly Way with its countless wonders as well as at other galaxies closer or more distant from the Milky Way, all of that make us to believe that one day we could better understand the universe and our role in it. Please take a deep breath and dive in together with me if you have not done it already.

Astrophotography

What the astrophotography does? It allows us to look into the history and take a picture of it.

Looking at the Sun we can see how it looked like cirrca about 8 minutes ago. A picture of our closest galaxy the Great Galaxy in Andromeda presents how it looked 2.3 million years ago as the light needed to travel this amount of time to be registered by a camera! For more distant galaxies it might be more than 65 million years so you might be looking at an image when dinosaurs still lived on our planet Earth. Thanks to astrophotography you can see things not not available to an open eye, a colorfull wonders of the Universe. Please join me with my adventure through a starry night sky.

Equipment

Amateur astronomy can be a rewarding and fascinating hobby.

If you would like to get a little bit more serious with this hobby, you would need to have acces to some astronomy equipment and accessories, including telescopes, telescope mounts, eyepieces, filters, and software or star charts. A more advanced amateur astrophotography could require some more sophisticated and expensive equatorial mounts and potentially cooled CCD cameras. However the final results would also depend on the quality of skies you use and which should be affected by light polution as little as possible and your processing skils. I believe that the information on my page should also give you a view on the equipment which I would recommend or currently use for purouses of the hobby.